LinkedIn Ads for small and medium-sized businesses

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Welcome to Qreativa web agency, your trusted partner in online marketing.

With a success story spanning over 10 years, we specialize in advanced advertising strategies, with a particular focus on LinkedIn Ads, as well as Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Tik Tok Ads, Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.

Our team is a blend of creative and technical minds, passionate and expert professionals, ready to support you in every strategic and operational step.

linkedin ads

Our LinkedIn Ads agency works closely with each client to thoroughly understand the nature of their business and various marketing objectives.

This personalized approach allows us to create targeted and highly performant advertising campaigns, capable of generating qualified traffic and leads.

Understanding where to start in the vast world of online advertising is a challenge, and this is where we come in.

Qreativa is more than an agency, it’s your trusted consultant.

To prove it to you, we are pleased to offer you an initial free 15-minute consultation, during which we will explore your needs and outline the opportunities that can make a difference in your path to success.

LinkedIn Ads sponsored messages consultation

This preliminary meeting will take place on easily accessible platforms like Zoom, ensuring convenience and direct contact with our experts, regardless of where you are located.

It will be an opportunity to get to know our way of working and understand how our skills can translate into concrete results for your business.

Let’s see what LinkedIn Ads is and why it’s useful for your business

LinkedIn Ads is a social network platform for online advertising offered by LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network.

This tool allows companies to reach a highly profiled audience, composed of professionals, decision-makers, and influencers in their field of interest.

How LinkedIn Ads works

Here are some reasons why it’s very important for a business to plan advertising campaigns on this platform:

Advanced targeting

LinkedIn has a unique wealth of professional data.

This means that campaigns can be targeted very precisely based on various criteria, such as industry, company size, role, skills, and much more.

This level of segmentation is almost impossible to find elsewhere.

Qualified audience

LinkedIn users are generally professionals who use the platform to connect with content, companies, and job offers relevant to their careers.

You’ll have access to an audience that is already more inclined to be involved with business solutions, B2B products, and networking opportunities.

LinkedIn advertising campaign audience

Professional environment

Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is a strictly professional environment.

Presenting your brand here helps build authority and credibility, showcasing you as a leader in your industry, in front of an audience that takes their investments and professional relationships seriously.

Various advertising formats

With LinkedIn advertising, you can leverage various content formats and strategies, from simple text ads and Sponsored Content (for richer and more engaging content) to Sponsored InMail (direct messages sent to users’ LinkedIn inboxes), giving ample space for creativity and customization of your message.

Quality lead generation

LinkedIn is known for having one of the highest conversion rates for lead generation, especially in the B2B sector.

The professional nature of the network helps you obtain more qualified leads compared to other advertising platforms.

LinkedIn Ads to connect with leads

What formats can you use for advertising on LinkedIn Ads? Read below

LinkedIn Ads offers various advertising formats and allows you to target your audience in creative and engaging ways.

Here’s an overview of the main formats you can use:

  • Sponsored Content: these ads appear directly in users’ LinkedIn feeds and are great for increasing brand awareness, promoting useful content and events, and gathering qualified leads. You can choose images, videos, or even image carousels.
LinkedIn message format sponsored content
  • Sponsored Messaging (or Sponsored InMail): allows you to send personalized messages directly to a targeted user’s LinkedIn inbox. This format is particularly effective for event invitations, personalized promotions, and other one-to-one communications.
sponsored messages LinkedIn Ads
  • Text Ads: are small text ads that appear in the sidebar or at the top of the LinkedIn page. They are ideal for campaigns with limited budgets and can help drive traffic to the website or specific landing pages.
LinkedIn Ads text ads max 150 characters
  • Dynamic Ads: these ads use information from users’ LinkedIn profiles (such as photos, company name, and job title) to create personalized ads. There are various types of Dynamic Ads, including Follower Ads to increase followers of the company page, Spotlight Ads to promote products, services, or events, and more.
dynamic ads LinkedIn Ads

Each format has its strengths and can, and should, always be optimized based on the different campaign objectives, whether it’s increasing engagement, generating leads, or building brand awareness.

The key is to understand your audience so you can choose and best leverage the format most suitable for your advertising strategy on LinkedIn.

Discover what goals you can achieve with LinkedIn advertising

Advertising on LinkedIn can support a range of business objectives, given the unique nature of the platform as a network of professionals and companies.

Here are some specific objectives you can achieve through LinkedIn Ads:

Brand awareness: get yourself known!

You can increase your brand visibility among professionals and companies, establishing your presence in the industry.

Use Sponsored Content or Video Ads to share stories, successes, or interesting content that reflect your company’s values and competencies.

For example, a software company might share articles or videos about industry innovations or successful case studies.

brand awareness LinkedIn page

Lead generation: acquire potential clients

Collect contact information from potential clients interested in your products or services. Use Lead Gen Forms along with Sponsored Content, and offer something of value (such as e-books, webinars, or free trials), incentivizing users to share their data to access the offer.

For example, a consulting firm might offer a free webinar on emerging market strategies.

lead generation LinkedIn ads

Engagement and interactions: interact and encourage interaction

Encourage the audience to interact with posts through likes, comments, and shares, creating an active community around the brand.

Create Sponsored Content or Carousel Ads that invite discussion, ask questions, or share content that is naturally shareable and relevant to your audience.

LinkedIn Ads interactions

A marketing agency like ours could, for example, ask for opinions on new industry trends.

Generate website traffic

Drive users to your website or a specific landing page. Use Text Ads or Sponsored Content with clear call-to-action (CTA) that invite users to click to learn more.

A professional clothing eCommerce can use this approach to lead people to discover a new collection.

Talent search and acquisition for your company

Find qualified candidates and unique talents that can enrich your company. Post job listings or use sponsored InMail to reach excellent candidates with job offers or career opportunities.

LinkedIn Ads targeting and retargeting

A growing startup might seek experts in emerging technologies, advertising exciting positions and growth opportunities.

Customer education and loyalty

Educate your target audience about a product/service, or keep current customers interested and loyal to the brand. Share useful content, guides, tutorials, or industry studies through various advertising formats.

A financial company could create a series of articles or educational videos on responsible investments or estate planning.

The key to success lies in creating campaigns that are highly targeted and relevant to the specific audience you want to reach on LinkedIn.

By understanding the needs and interests of your ideal customers, you can use LinkedIn Ads to present appropriate and engaging solutions.

How LinkedIn Ads work: guide to creating sponsored content

Creating sponsored content on LinkedIn Ads is a process that requires planning, accurate segmentation, content creativity, and results analysis.

Here’s how to get started with creating sponsored content on the platform:

1. Accessing Campaign Manager

To begin, you need to log into your LinkedIn account and visit the Campaign Manager, LinkedIn’s tool for managing advertising campaigns.

If you don’t have an advertising account yet, you need to create one associated with your Company Page.

LinkedIn campaign manager

2. Creating the campaign

Once you’re in the Campaign Manager, it’s time to create a new campaign.

Select Create campaign and choose the objective that best suits your purposes, such as lead generation, engagement, or video views.

3. Audience targeting

After defining the objective, you need to segment the audience you want to reach.

You can target based on various criteria such as location, demographics, skills, current employment, industry, company size, and much more.

Accurate segmentation is crucial for your message to reach the most relevant users.

LinkedIn target audience

4. Selecting ad format

Choose “Sponsored Content” when asked to select the type of ad you want to create.

This will allow you to sponsor existing posts or create new content to promote directly in users’ LinkedIn feeds.

5. Creating the content

Now it’s time to create the sponsored content. You can select an existing post from your Company Page or create a new ad.

When creating a new ad, make sure the message is clear, the content is visually appealing, and it includes a clear call-to-action (CTA).

The CTA should tell the user exactly what to do, whether it’s to sign up, download, or register.

6. Setting the budget and duration

After finalizing the content, set a campaign budget. You can choose between a daily or total budget and decide on the type of bid (for example, CPC, CPM, or CPA).

Additionally, you need to specify the duration of your campaign by selecting start and end dates.

LinkedIn Ads campaign budget

7. Review and launch

Before launching the campaign, review all settings and content to ensure everything is correct.

This includes audience segmentation, budget, campaign dates, and of course, the ad itself. Once everything is set up correctly, you can publish.

8. Monitoring and optimization

After launch, it is essential to monitor the campaign’s performance through the Campaign Manager.

Here, you can view key metrics such as impressions, clicks, spend, and conversions.

Based on this data, you might want to make changes to optimize performance, such as adjusting targeting, modifying the CTA, or adapting the budget.

LinkedIn Insight Tag Manager better results

Remember, success on LinkedIn Ads requires continuous experimentation and optimization.

Always analyze the performance of your campaigns and test new ideas to see what works best with your audience.

Here are the 3 marketing objectives of LinkedIn Ads

In digital marketing, especially in LinkedIn advertising, it’s essential to understand the various marketing objectives to maximize the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

LinkedIn primarily identifies three key objectives in advertising: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversions.

1. Awareness:

The main goal of this phase is to increase awareness of your brand among a wider audience. You want more people to know about your company, product, service, or initiative.

This is the first step to enter the minds of consumers, essential especially if you’re new to the market, launching a product, or trying to expand your reach into new audience segments.

How awareness works on LinkedIn Ads

In this phase, you’ll use ads with a broad target to reach as many people as possible.

The ads are designed to capture attention and are generally more focused on visual storytelling. The key metric is usually the number of impressions.

2. Consideration:

The right choice if you want to encourage your target market to seek further information about what you offer.

If you want to stimulate “interest and” engagement, inviting potential customers to engage more meaningfully with your content, which could be reading a blog post, signing up for a newsletter, downloading an ebook, or watching a video.

LinkedIn consideration objective

Ads in this phase are designed to engage and invite action. It’s not just about seeing an ad, but interacting with it.

Measuring success in this phase is based on metrics such as click-through rates, video views, resource downloads, webinar registrations, among others.

3. Conversions:

After building awareness and stimulating “interest, you’re now guiding your audience to take an” action that directly impacts your company’s objectives.

This could mean making a purchase, filling out a form to become a qualified lead, signing up for a course, or any other action that results in a customer ready to buy or promote your brand.

Ads in this phase are highly targeted and relevant. You’ll use strong call-to-actions (CTAs) and incentives to drive conversions, with a clear explanation of the value the user will get by taking this action.

Conversions on LinkedIn

Here, the key metrics include the number of actual conversions, cost per conversion (CPC), and return on ad spend (ROAS).

Each stage of the advertising journey on LinkedIn requires a unique approach and creative strategies. Understanding these objectives will allow you to create more effective campaigns and accurately measure their success based on your company’s goals.

LinkedIn Audience Network, why choose it for LinkedIn campaigns? We explain it to you

The LinkedIn Audience Network is a platform that allows advertisers to extend the reach of their ads beyond LinkedIn’s website and app.

It allows your ads to appear on a network of third-party websites and apps that have partnered with LinkedIn.

This means that your ads can reach professionals even when they’re not directly using LinkedIn, helping to improve brand awareness, engagement, and conversions. Here’s how it works and what advantages it offers:

How it works

When you create an advertising campaign on LinkedIn, you can choose to activate the LinkedIn Audience Network. By doing so, LinkedIn will use its targeting information and technologies to show your ads to relevant users across its professional network, which includes various websites and mobile applications.

LinkedIn Audience Network

The platform uses its dataset to ensure that your ads are shown to people who are in your target audience, even if they are outside of LinkedIn.

This significantly extends the reach of your advertising campaigns.

Advantages:

  • Increased reach: your ads can reach millions of professionals in contexts outside of LinkedIn, increasing the visibility of your messages.
  • Effective targeting: the LinkedIn Audience Network leverages the same detailed targeting capabilities available in standard LinkedIn campaigns. This means your ads will still be targeted based on job position, skills, and other criteria you’ve set.
  • Performance optimization: the network helps improve the conversion rate and ROI of your advertising campaigns. LinkedIn also claims that the quality of traffic is high, with lower chances of accidental clicks.
  • Reports and analytics: you can monitor the performance of your campaigns through LinkedIn’s normal reporting tools, allowing you to see how much traffic and how many conversions you’re getting through the Audience Network.

It’s important to note that the LinkedIn Audience Network can increase reach and engagement, and advertisers should carefully monitor campaign metrics.

In some cases, you may find that your ads perform better on LinkedIn itself or on specific sites/apps in the network.

As always, continuous optimization is key to maximizing the success of your advertising campaigns.

A fundamental step: defining the audience for LinkedIn Ads

Having a clear understanding of the audience for your LinkedIn campaigns is one of the first, and most important, steps in the process of creating advertising on this platform.

Accurate targeting ensures that your message reaches the people most likely to be interested in and respond to your content, product, or service.

LinkedIn audience

Here’s how to proceed to define the audience for your LinkedIn campaigns:

1. Identify your ideal customer

Before diving into the specifics of the platform, it’s essential to have a clear picture of your ideal customer. You need to know:

  • Industry and company size: in which field does your ideal customer operate? What type of company do they work for? Large corporations, SMEs, start-ups?
  • Role and seniority: what positions do they hold? Manager, executive, specialist, decision-maker?
  • Needs and interests: what are their professional challenges? What kind of solutions are they looking for?

2. Use LinkedIn’s targeting options

Once you have a clear idea of your ideal customer, you can use LinkedIn’s targeting tools to refine your audience. Options include:

  • Demographic targeting: you can select your audience based on criteria such as age, gender, geographic location.
  • Company targeting: this allows you to target by company name, industry, and size.
  • Job experience targeting: here you can refine your audience based on specific job titles, job functions, skills, seniority, and years of experience.
  • Education targeting: this criterion is based on education level, fields of study, and universities attended.
  • Group targeting: if your ideal customers belong to specific groups on LinkedIn, you can also target these groups.
  • Interests and behaviors: include professional interests and behaviors on LinkedIn.

3. Consider using Audience Expansion

LinkedIn offers a feature called Audience Expansion, which allows you to reach people with characteristics and behaviors similar to your target audience.

LinkedIn audience expansion

This can be useful if you are sure of your ideal customer profile and want to maximize your reach to similar users.

4. Experiment and Optimize

The world of online advertising requires constant experimentation. You might start with a broader audience and then narrow it down as you get more data on your campaign’s performance.

Or, conversely, you could start with a very specific audience and then expand it to test the reaction.

5. Monitor and Adjust

After launching your campaigns, the analysis of collected data will tell you a lot about your audience.

Use Campaign Manager to understand which segments of your audience are interacting more with your content. This will help you refine your targeting strategies for future campaigns.

social media linkedin

Remember, defining the audience is a process that requires “careful reflection and continuous analysis. What works for one campaign might not work for another”.

The key is to stay attentive to metrics and be ready to adapt based on the performance of your advertising campaigns.

How much does advertising on LinkedIn Ads cost? The question of questions that we answer

The cost of advertising on LinkedIn varies depending on the type of advertising campaign you choose, your target audience, budget, and bidding strategy.

linkedin advertising costs

LinkedIn offers various payment options for advertising campaigns, allowing you to choose the one that best suits your goals and budget. The main cost types are:

  1. Cost per Click (CPC): you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. This is ideal when you want to drive specific traffic to your website or landing page.
  2. Cost per 1,000 Impressions (CPM): you pay for every 1,000 views of your ad, regardless of user actions. This approach is preferable if your main goal is to increase brand awareness.
  3. Cost per Send (CPS): applicable to sponsored InMail ads, you pay each time your message is sent to someone and effectively reaches the user’s inbox.

Factors that influence the cost of sponsored ads on LinkedIn Ads

Several elements can affect the costs of your LinkedIn campaign, including:

  • Your audience: campaigns targeting highly competitive industries, or high position levels, can cost more due to increased competition for this audience.
  • Budget and bids: LinkedIn will allow you to set a daily budget and a total limit for your campaign, and will allow you to bid for clicks or impressions. Your bid will have to compete with those of other advertisers targeting a similar audience.
  • Campaign duration: the length of your campaign will affect the total cost. Longer campaigns will require a higher budget.

Average costs for advertising on LinkedIn

It’s difficult to establish a precise average cost for advertising on LinkedIn, as it will vary depending on the factors mentioned above.

However, on average in Italy, advertisers can expect to spend these figures:

  • CPC: can have a cost per click that varies, for example, between 2 and 5 euros for less competitive ads, but higher CPCs for highly competitive sectors.
  • CPM: you can expect to pay from a few tens to a few hundred euros per 1,000 impressions, depending on your targeting and your industry.
  • CPS: for Sponsored InMail, the cost per send can be even higher than CPCs, due to the direct and personal nature of these messages.

At Qreativa, we have been managing LinkedIn campaigns for over 10 years, customized based on the needs of each individual client and the available budget.

The best approach is to start with an experimental budget, test different creatives, bids, and audiences, and then optimize based on campaign performance.

LinkedIn also offers detailed reporting tools that can help you understand which aspects of your campaign are working and which can be improved to achieve a better ROI.

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Book a free Zoom call with one of our specialists, it will last from 15 to 30 minutes and you can ask questions and get clear and concise answers.